Found this on The Australian wire!

Chris Koh has a fetish for boxes.

She uses them for all sorts of things and says they can be turned into anything. Over the last four months, she’s joined the cigar box revolution and her love of boxes and of music has seen her transform a pile of cigar boxes she’d collected years ago into about 50 cigar box guitars.

The first time Chris saw a cigar box guitar was at a music gig earlier this year in Uki. She saw musician Nigel McTrusty playing a strange instrument and as soon as he had finished playing, she went up and asked him what it was. He told her he had made it himself and let her have a strum.

Chris was so excited about it that she went straight home and made one for herself.

“They are addictive,” Chris said. “You have to be careful.”

Although she’d never made one before, Chris just knew when she saw her first cigar box guitar that she had found the thing she had been looking to do. She didn’t research how to make them, but had always had a knack for making things. She has been a builder, plumber, mechanic and Jill-of-all-trades her whole life.

“I’ve always been a hands-on person; my gift is being able to see something and figure it out,” Chris said. “As soon as I started making these guitars, it was like a doorway opened for me. I just knew this was my new path, mixing my music with my building skills.”

When I arrived at Chris’s workshop to see how these unique guitars were made, Chris was sitting by her amplifier playing one, improvising blue-grass tunes by running a glass slide up and down the guitar’s long neck.

“This one’s my favourite,” she said. “I love the tone of it.”

Nearby is another beautiful guitar made from a cigar box with a picture of Punch (of Punch and Judy fame) on the front. Around the room are numerous other cigar box guitars, each covered with bolts, pieces of metal and nuts, and the fret positions are marked by screws drilled into the side of the neck. These are not typical guitars. Every one is unique and different. Some have 100-year-old pictures or writing on the front, or a smoking warning on the side. Some have two strings, others three or five strings. There’s also a guitar made from a metal biscuit tin and one made for a left-handed player.

When Chris took me through into her workshop, I could see wood shavings on the floor and an array of tools on her workbench, along with all sorts of bits of metal. Chris was in the process of constructing a new guitar out of an Ashton cigar box. While I watched, she carefully measured each position for the three tuning pegs on the guitar’s head and drilled holes for them. Then she took out a piezo pickup and wires and soldered all of the pieces into place before gluing them to the inside of the cigar box.

“I absolutely love making them,” Chris said. “This is like a meditation.”

Cigar box guitars were first invented in America in the 1800s. They were originally created by poor black folk who would go through the trash and find discarded cigar boxes and then turn them into guitars with whatever resources were available to them. Some of them were made with broomsticks for necks, timber pegs for machine heads and baling wire for strings.

“I’ve seen a guy who made one and used bolts for the machine heads and the strings were actually pieces of string,” Chris said. “I love that it’s about recycling; the boxes are not new.”

Making cigar box guitars fits with Chris’s ongoing philosophy of sustainability.

“People have always hassled me about keeping all this random old junk,” Chris said, gesturing toward everything in her workshop. “I can re-use the boxes, old allen keys and bolts; just like in the old days, using whatever was around.”

This simple invention with its roots in poverty has been responsible for inspiring some of the blues legends we know today – even Jimi Hendrix is reported to have made his own version of one when he was young, using rubber bands as strings.

Just like some of the blues greats, Chris’s natural ability to be resourceful and build things had its roots in her own non-affluent childhood. Her family didn’t have much money and she would go to the tip and find things and fix them. When she was seven years old, she even made her own skateboards and pushbikes.

“When I was a kid we didn’t have a TV and I made the mistake once of saying to Mum that I was bored so she sent me out to do extensions on the goat shed,” Chris laughed. “I never made the mistake of saying I

was bored again.”

Chris has since built two houses of her own and numerous houses for other people, as well as being a recycled furniture designer at Off The Rails in Sydney, making furniture out of recycled materials.

With a good working knowledge of timber, Chris knew that she only wanted to use good quality wood when she was making her cigar box guitars. Her search for a place to buy strong timbers that were nice to work with, such as myrtle, American oak or rock maple (used by Fender to make guitar necks) led her to master cabinet maker Geoff Hannah.

“We hit it off straight away,” Chris said. “I didn’t know who he was, but when I looked at some of his inlay, I recognised his work.”

Chris had been in a Sydney art gallery 20 years ago and spent four hours looking at one of Geoff’s pieces and opening all of the drawers.

“It was so ridiculously perfect, there were hidden things inside hidden things,” Chris said. “I could see he had spent a long time working on each bit and I appreciated the effort and skill he had put into it. He is a master of masters; you don’t get any better. I have so much respect for him and I love the fact that he supplies me with the timber for my guitars.”

Because she has made a few already, Chris knows she likes certain boxes for the sound and the look, and now orders shipments of old cigar boxes from America.

“Each guitar is like a little artwork; there are no two the same,” Chris said. “All the tones will vary too; you don’t know until you have finished it what it will sound like. I love it; it gives me a creative outlet. It’s art, music, and my timber skills together.”

In her workshop, Chris has been putting the finishing touches on the Ashton cigar box guitar I saw her making earlier. She has strung three golden strings onto it and they match beautifully with the red and gold label on the box. She tunes it by ear to an open tuning and then plugs it in to the amplifier; and another new guitar with very old origins is born.

Since she started making cigar box guitars, Chris said she has had an overwhelmingly fantastic response from people.

“I can’t keep up with demand,” Chris said. “Two shops came to me when I was busking and asked if they could sell them. You will see them everywhere soon.”

She has been selling them at the weekend markets in Lismore, Bangalow and Byron and has some for sale at Lismore Music. Chris thinks the popularity of these guitars may be fuelled by a resurgence of the Depression-era jug band style of music and a do-it-yourself culture. She has even had people approach her to custom-make banjos or guitars from their grandmother’s heirloom boxes.

“One of the most beautiful feelings is seeing someone pick up something I’ve made and love it,” Chris said. “When an amazing slide guitar player picks one up, it gives me a buzz to see their happiness and hear them really play it.”

Just as with her natural ability to make things, Chris also learned guitar when she was seven by “just picking it up”. She has always wanted to play slide guitar and her dream is to jam with Shane Speal, “the amazing god of cigar box guitars”.

“He has slide lessons on the internet for cigar box guitars,” Chris said. “I’ve been so busy making them that I haven’t had time to practise. I just want to sit down for hours and hours and nail it.”

Next year, Chris hopes to run workshops to teach other people some of her skills and encourage them to ‘do it themselves’ and be creative by making these guitars. Right now, she’s making cigar box guitars seven days a week and she’s starting to make a living from it. If you’re interested in Chris’s cigar box guitars, you can phone her on 0427 665 929.